The entire business world wants to move faster, collaborate faster, and innovate more because of the dramatic and extraordinary changes brought about by the advent of the digital world. However, Organization’s ambitions are checked by two things. First, most IT leaders work in a world where most of the collective efforts are spent just maintaining the existing IT landscape. And secondly, the majority of risk lies in the capability and inability of the IT security team to manage the risk arising from new technology and use cases.

It is possible to create a corporate culture of innovation while weaving security principles into the design of every application, data access point, and integration. Don’t expect this to come from the software you buy, however. Instead, thinking differently about changing your business’s clock speed would be best. Organizations can create a framework for faster innovation — and build in security by design — by building an application network.

Cloud-based mobile apps are increasing drastically, resulting in an exposed surface area of the business. Each new app requires and enables access to organizational data and assets. Unless security was explicitly involved in the app’s creation, acquisition, and delivery, users inside and outside the Organization might have access to data and the ability to expose it further. This visibility challenge is compounded by the lack of standards by which organizational data and assets are shared and exposed. Different business units may adopt their approach to security or perhaps not take one at all, making it difficult to implement security best practices. As a result, standardization and visibility have emerged as essential traits of any security structure. This can be done by providing well-defined entry points and exit points to organizational data and assets and ensuring that standards are well documented. To implement the best security services while exposing data and assets to the other world, MuleSoft Anypoint offers a complete security service that covers the following.

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As organizations are building out and connecting more and more of these systems, they are not necessarily creating more and more connections; they are reusing the ones already created and managed by the security team. This approach to IT architecture, called API-led connectivity, allows the business to go faster; organizations can also get governance and compliance, thanks to the API, an accessible and widely understood standard.

When architecture is developed this way, it’s necessary to build mechanisms for visibility and security in each part by adopting API security best practices. It can’t be imposed top-down like an SOA initiative; every group developing a service is doing it in a standardized, well-defined way that allows security to happen. When any group is building a project, connecting services, or building new ones and creating business value, they should always be thinking about “how do I create new assets as a result of this thing?” It should be an organizational discipline and natural in the development methodology; every new service creates assets to be reused later. That means that the next project can use those aspects again and again.

Each node or service must add value to the whole network. That’s the engine that makes this turn on; it creates the network effect and makes people want to participate. People start to see value in the network, and they automatically contribute more nodes to this to ensure people get more value out of it, so it spreads. Eventually, that makes the entire Organization adopt the API authentication best practices and not create shadow systems.

What emerges out of this approach is an application network that is structurally more secure. It’s organized around well-defined building blocks, which all have an API linking them to the application network. Security is built in because one can define a door through an API and cleanly define the inside and outside for API security MuleSoft.

With an application network, these doors are built into your integration fabric, making the network more secure. The API entryways are managed, and access patterns can be reused; the good structure has been validated and reused multiple times. It’s highly tunable and configurable; with a standardized access point via an API, you can easily suspend access to one service without harming others. This makes the application network resilient; it bends, unlike point-to-point architectures. The result is layers of MuleSoft API security with central governance and visibility.

Businesses are going faster; there are more systems in existence. Yet, by creating some level of standardization, encapsulation, and overall reusable patterns, paradoxically, complexity is reduced even if the volume is going up.

Increasing the number of services organizations bring online does not increase the risk of attack if everyone responsible for developing services controls access to their data. The data custodian is responsible for exposing the data and controlling who has access to that data. With an application network, all entry points are encapsulated and standardized; not only does each one represents a smaller attack level, but also because the result is defense in depth.

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MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is a complete solution for API-led connectivity that creates a seamless application network of apps, data, and devices, both on-premises and in the cloud.
Why Anypoint Platform?

• Unified platform for API-led connectivity – Anypoint Platform provides full API lifecycle management and enterprise-grade connectivity on a single platform.
• Full API lifecycle management platform – API Management is only one piece of the puzzle. As companies build APIs, they need an entire SDLC from design, collaboration, build, test, deploy, publish, version, and retire. Anypoint Platform provides capabilities at each of these lifecycle stages.
• Creates application networks secured and governed by design – Every node in the network – every connection and every API – can be governed using policies. Policies can be enforced and updated without changing the underlying code with API Manager.
• Changes the clock speed of your business with self-service consumption – Unlock data and break down silos between development teams by publishing APIs that developers can discover, access, and use in a self-service model with Anypoint Exchange – the component of Anypoint Platform that captures all APIs, templates, and connectors you create and allows you to share these assets with different groups within or outside of your organization.
• Single runtime for cloud and on-premises – Deploy in any cloud, data center, on-premises, or hybrid environment. You write and deploy or redeploy the application in any environment seamlessly.
• Built for agile development and DevOps – The platform works with the common toolchains used for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), i.e., SCM, Maven, Junit, Jenkins, and works well in DevOps environments to build and manage microservices, and the platform can be containerized.

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Royal Cyber has extensive knowledge in implementing and configuring Anypoint security services for its customers by sharing the API authentication best practices. In addition, with global implementation expertise in MuleSoft security best practices, we have the right set of people and processes in place to help your business in this digital transformation journey. For more information, you can email us at [email protected] or visit www.royalcyber.com.